A Response to Kevin's Blog Series

Over at Creideamh Kevin has just completed a perceptive blog series on The Meaning of Marriage by the Kellers, which culminated in a review of Trevor Morrow’s Equal to Rule. Rather than having to wait each day for a new episode, the whole season can now be watched in one sitting. That’s the beauty of the Netflix age.

To summarise, Kevin praised the Keller’s for being complimentarians who are as uncomplimentarian as it’s possible to be while still remaining complimentarians. But then he criticised them for the implicit (and explicit) natural theology which props up their perspective, and for the subordinationist doctrine of the Trinity which appears at important junctures. (I wonder if in fact these two problems are simply two sides of the same coin, with the Trinitarian life of the God-head receiving its intelligibility from the natural world. The complimentarian position then becomes a way of “explaining” or “understanding” the ineffable mystery of the Trinity. As Augustine once said, if you understand it then it isn’t God. Basing a social ethic off of it implies understanding it, and claiming to understand it is a sign that it isn’t God!)

Whether the Kellers are guilty of what Kevin charges them with I don’t know, because I made a vow before God never to read another book on “relationships.” But Kevin is a gracious and judicious reader of texts, so there is good reason to trust his argument.

There is one issue I have with Kevin’s series which I’ve highlighted in the comments, and which he touched on in the final instalment. It is the issue of biblical interpretation. Kevin, based on Morrow’s book, describes the following hermeneutic:

You begin in Genesis 1 and 2 with equality. In Genesis 3 there is Fall and the distortion of gender identity that produces, among all the other chaos, misogyny and the rest of the sin that we bear. But from that point onwards the culture-transcending revelation of God pierces through with judges and prophets and poets and saints that direct our attention to the restoration of creation’s goodness. This comes to fruition in Jesus, and Morrow reads the succeeding letters of the New Testament as part of the real-time working-out of what the Kingdom means for worshipping communities. Figuring out what it means for gender is why we have the passages over which people battle.

This is a hermeneutic that will go a long way toward figuring out what it means to live in the Kingdom, but I have one problem with it. The word which pierces us is not “culture-transcending” – or at least not all the time. The fall pervades even the biblical text. The word which (when read in a certain way) calls us out of patriarchy is also implicated in the very patriarchy which it calls us out of. This is why figuring what the Kingdom means for gender necessarily involves critical reading. This isn’t a simplistic criticism which lambasts Paul for how wrong he was. Nevertheless, it is possible to be critical of Paul while being faithful to the Gospel which he preached. Consider some of New Testament scholar and United Methodist minister Richard Hays’s comments on 1 Corinthians 11.

This is a difficult text that has been omitted from the revised lectionary. In it Paul speaks of man being “the image and glory of God” and woman being “the glory of man”. Hays says that “regrettably, Paul gets himself into a theological quagmire” (186). This is regrettable, argues Hays, because Paul’s interpretation of Genesis 1:27 is faulty, most likely based on a tradition which sees only the man as the original image-bearer. This interpretation leaves Paul espousing “the ontological priority of the male” (187). Hays says that “[Paul’s] arguments may appear unpersuasive and objectionable to modern readers, but there is no point in attempting to explain away what Paul actually wrote” (187).

What is also interesting about this passage from 1 Corinthians 11 is that Paul appeals to “nature” (physis) as a source for normative behaviour (1 Cor. 11:14). This appeal, Hays writes, was characteristic of Stoic and Cynic philosophers (189). Given the Corinthians’ love of Greek wisdom Paul perhaps adopts it as a rhetorical device, but he nevertheless adopts it. Barth’s “nein!” may quite rightly be aimed in Paul’s direction at this point.

Hays’s “reflections for teachers and preachers” offers some practical advice on how such a passage can help us to figure out what it means to live in the Kingdom. First, he says that we should practice “hermeneutical honesty,” never pretending to understand more than we can (190). This is a culturally-conditioned text whose details often lie beyond our grasp. Yet Hays states that all texts are culturally conditioned, and so the cultural idiosyncrasies of this particular text do not mean that it does not apply to us. Rather, it applies to us as much as any other text.

Hays says that the aim of Paul’s letters in general (and this letter in particular) “is to reshape his churches into cultural patterns that he takes to be consistent with the gospel” (190). Hays then brings the following question to 1 Corinthians 11: are Paul’s directives persuasive on their own terms? In other words, does Paul mount an argument that is consonant with his own theological vision? (190) Hays’s answer is yes and no. On the one hand, the created distinction between man and woman is consonant with Paul’s theological vision. On the other hand, the hierarchy which he justifies based on a “problematical exegesis” of Genesis leads to a weak argument (190-1). What then should we do with this passage? Hays offers three pieces of advice.

First, the created distinction between man and woman should be upheld by the church. “We are not disembodied spirits,” says Hays, and so the particularity of our bodies should be reflected in our dress and appearance (191). Second, Hays sees in this passage a Pauline argument for the functional equality of men and women. He goes so far as to say that “[a]nyone who appeals to this passage to silence women or to deny them leadership roles in the church is flagrantly misusing the text” (191). Third, Hays says that the “patriarchal implications” of verses 3 and 7-9 must be confronted. How should we confront them? Hays suggests that we consider other readings of Genesis that might challenge Paul’s and which “might lead us to conclusions about the relation between male and female that are not precisely the same as Paul’s” (192).

Another strategy suggested by Hays is to begin with the clause “God is the head of Christ” and to explore what this headship might mean within a Trinitarian understanding of God. Hays claims, rather uncontentiously, that Paul had no explicit doctrine of the Trinity (192). He also claims that Paul appears to operate with a subordinationist Christology (see 1 Cor. 15:28). According to Hays, the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity actually works against the subordinationist implications of Paul’s argument. These suggested strategies do not lead to “simplistic arguments about whether Paul was right or wrong” but rather “enable us to rethink more deeply the substantive theological issues raised by his treatment of hairstyles in the worship of the Corinthian church” (192).

I offer Hays’s interpretation of this contentious Pauline text as a way of showing how a gracious and judicious reading of the biblical text might be carried out. Bringing this back to Kevin’s series, it is interesting that the charge of “natural theology” or “subordinationism” could be levelled at Paul’s own work on gender relations. This leads me to believe that as long as Paul cannot be read critically, the complimentarianism of the Kellers will continue to flourish.